A silent arrival and departure from your hunting area ensures success on opening day to avoid alerting deer to your presence.
Scouting and preseason setup ensure success on opening day.
Opening day of hunting season comprises many experiences, hopefully with a venison finale. Regardless of whether your hunt kicks off on the actual opener of the season or your personal opener occurs when your career allows, be ready for success with these five categories to master to ensure a great kickoff to the hunt. Here’s how to shoot a deer on opening day.
HuntStand Pro Whitetail’s Whitetail Activity Forecast gives you excellent forecasts on how to plan for opening day.
1. Scout with Seasonality in Mind
Above all, scout. This seems like an odd thing to include, but even with the unlimited potential in trail cameras and coordinating them with HuntStand Pro Whitetail, the coziness you get after repeatedly hunting a property could throw a huge wrench into your hunt. Depending on the season you hunt, early fall, rut, or late season, tailor your scouting, or you could miss clues on a changing playing field.
In the early season, whitetail bucks and does have one thing on their mind: food. They fully understand that the rut and winter await them. To thwart the effects of nonstop movement in the rut, and dried out leftovers in the winter, they pack on the pounds in the early season. Focus your scouting efforts on the highest-quality food in the neighborhood. If that food source lies off your property and on the neighbors, a pattern switch could sink your hunt, especially if you do not follow the clues.
How to Hunt Fringe Winds (A.K.A. Just-Off Winds)
During the rut, your focus should be on doe groups. Bands of females attract the attention of all bucks. The female herds might be right on the same fields you watched in the early season. More than likely, though, they moved. Harvesting, hunting pressure, and frost changing the palatability of food all could make substantial changes where groups of females gather.
Adjust trail cameras and be prepared for bucks to completely disappear once breeding begins. They really do not lock down, but time spent with hot does and forays to neighboring properties sure makes you feel like deer do a major disappearing act.
Finally, as the rut slows down and bucks suddenly discover they must wear skinny jeans due to a 20% (or more) of weight loss, again focus on food. Food plots heavy with brassica or turnips attract hungry deer, as do fields with spilt grain, like corn or soybeans. Once you locate a concentration of deer, spend a day or two monitoring to unravel suspected travel routes to a food source, before setting up your ambush.
Big events, like farming, could disrupt deer on parts of a hunting property.
2. Choose the Right Hunting Strategy
As your scouting spits out details, and you confirm them with the Whitetail Forecast with HuntStand Pro Whitetail, choose a strategy for success. It might depend on a food plot, a massive agricultural field, a hollow leading from the neighbor’s field or even repeat visits to a stand of oaks in a woodlot.
Using the trail camera feature with HuntStand Pro Whitetail gives you the power to connect cameras, review images, and then catalog them for a coordinated view on your app. The Trail Cams feature does more than that, but when you begin connecting the dots, it provides you with a clear picture of what strategy offers the highest chance for success. Pay particular attention to the time of day, and if the pattern repeats itself daily or every other day.
Once a pattern sets itself apart for ambush opportunity, prep your ambush at least a week or more before the season opener. Treestands are easy to veil, but a new ground blind or permanent shooting blind should be set several weeks in advance of the season. Deer need time to become accustomed to the new landmark. Even a well, brushed-in blind stands out in a deer’s world.
How to “Beat” a Deer’s Nose
If you must set a treestand and hunt it the following day, use your trail camera and intel to decide what period offers a chance to avoid most deer traffic in an area. You do not want to be hanging a treestand along a food plot edge right before dark. The same goes with hanging an interior stand. Any ambush near a bedding area requires a late-day (or nighttime) approach to allow deer a chance to leave the sanctuary for food sources beyond.
Events, such as breezy or drizzly days, can also provide ample cover to slip in and out of an area while prepping a hunting spot. Timing your intrusion with local land management chores also offers a cloaking system. Tractors in a field, four-wheelers moving cattle, and a chainsaw buzzing nearby could give you the cover needed to get in and out while setting up your ambush invisibly.
Include the use of calls, decoys, and scents when applicable. All three of these tactics shine during the pre-rut and continue producing close encounters into the post-rut.
With the right planning, you can expect to hunt deer that are not aware of your presence for success on opening day.
3. Select the Right Stand Locations and Access Routes
Scouting completed and a solid strategy in place, concentrate all your next efforts to making yourself invisible on your opener. For starters, using HuntStand Pro Whitetail, search for invisible entrances and equally invisible exit routes to your ambush. By staying out of sight, the entrance to your ambush keeps your entire opening-day plan a secret. This is important for both a morning and afternoon hunt. If deer sense your presence, they could alter their patterns enough to avoid your stand area, even forcing you to produce a new strategy if deer shift to a new pattern.
Topography continues to be the best invisible route for ingress and egress from your stand. Fire up HuntStand and search for draws, ditches, creek beds, and other terrain features providing cover to your movement. The Natural Atlas feature overlays topographical information to help you see these rolling changes in the terrain. This, in combination with predominant winds for your ambush position, aid in masking your presence. HuntZone provides real-time information on not only wind direction but also how your scent disperses while hiking in and out (plus from your ambush site).
How to Stop Deer for a Shot Opportunity
To aid your hidden travel route, arrive ultra early. This allows you to use darkness while arriving in the morning. Deer see well in the dark, but are not equipped with night vision goggles. They might see a form, but if you arrive downwind, remain silent, and use terrain as much as possible, your odds increase of not spooking deer. Plus, an early arrival gives the woods ample time to resettle after you settle into your stand.
Follow the same protocol in the afternoon. Arrive early so you will not bump any deer already up and feeding on fields in the afternoon. Set your ambush play in motion a full hour before you normally would. Use your invisible access routes, arrive early, and your odds increase for a meeting of unsuspecting deer.
It goes without saying but follow a stringent scent-elimination protocol. Wash all your clothing and gear before taking it into the field. Spray down all your equipment when you leave your truck, and wear rubber-bottomed or scent-free boots to hunt. Now, you are ready for the opener.
The opening day hunting crowd can work in your favor if you arrive early and in front of the hunting army.
4. Consider Other Hunters
Unless you have Elon Musk money, you likely share a hunting property with a handful of other hunters. On public land, the list could grow to great numbers. On a true opening day, the pressure from other hunters has the potential to wreak havoc in the deer woods. There is no way to sugarcoat this. Your hunt could be ruined by your hunting brethren.
That said, think positively. This invading army could also be a Godsend. To take advantage of others moving deer on a property, get in the way. Your goal is to intercept deer moving away from hunting pressure.
Advanced Trail Camera Tactics for Deer [HuntClass]
Put that early-morning Batman move into play and arrive extra early. Using HuntStand, use your previously marked route of invisible ingress to reach an interior ambush site. The best ambush location for this setup, if you have multiple setups, is refuge deer would seek out when they feel hunting pressure. Think of obvious escape corridors and sanctuary settings where deer flee when spooked. Funnels or pinch points stand out if they lead to the best sanctuary on a property.
On a traditional opening day, you might opt to stay in the stand all day. Hunting pressure could spike in the morning, but the trickle of hunters in and out of the woods adds up to deer movement any time of the day. Add to that fact deer movement predicted by the Whitetail Activity Forecast feature in HuntStand, and you have a basis to plan an entire day of hunting. Even a midday move to a stand closer to a food source might be a possibility based on what the activity score reports on the forecast app.
Having a plan and a backup plan for your opening day of hunting season just makes sense for success.
5. Have Backup Hunt Plans
Finally, have a backup plan in place … for everything. It always pays to have at least two stands or ground blinds at each hot location. You have no idea weeks ahead of what the wind direction will be on your opening day of hunting. Using the HuntStand Weather feature offers a view into future forecasts, but oftentimes, the most solid data is from a day or two prior to your hunt. Plan for all predominate winds.
Next, back up equipment so you can place another stand quickly. A new pattern suddenly appears on a property. The neighbor could harvest a cornfield, cattle could invade a river bottom, or hunting pressure might send deer into a tizzy. A second stand or blind waiting in your equipment shed gives you options to have another ambush in play without moving already set gear in sensitive whitetail habitat.
Finally, don’t hesitate to change strategies on the opener if you see a phenomenon that allows you to take advantage of deer behavior. On opening morning, you might see a horde of bucks chasing one doe into a wetland. Instead of patiently waiting hundreds of yards away, drop from your stand and stalk closer. You never know. The craziness could rush right by you giving you an opening day to remember.
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